It’s past the time to wonder whether athletes understand how Twitter works. It’s not that hard, especially for them, the generation in large part that created it.

In a nutshell: With few, very specific exceptions, what you post, everybody sees. Not just your identically knuckleheaded friend. Everybody.

Bradley Patterson used a racial slur against President Obama in a tweet he sent out Sunday night. (Twitter Photo/AP Photo)

Here’s a better question, and maybe less condescending: Do these athletes just not care? Is knowing that their small-mindedness is on display for the whole planet to observe part of the attraction? Are they’re so self-absorbed, so incapable of getting over themselves, that they enjoy it, and to hell with the consequences?

Can’t rule that out. Not anymore.

This is asked directly of the latest athletes to step, either unwittingly or completely willingly, into the social media trap, Bradley Patterson and Noah Syndergaard.

Who? Exactly. Until this week.

Suddenly, and against its wishes, America found out about Patterson, a walk-on football player at Division II North Alabama. Deadspin.com yanked the veil of anonymity from him when it listed his tweet on Sunday night—when NBC pre-empted its NFL game for President Obama’s speech from the Newtown massacre memorial service—as one of the dozens which referred to Obama with a way-too-common racial slur.

Whatever instantaneous pleasure he got from hitting send and entertaining his inner circle, evaporated fast. As soon as the Internet trail of evidence led back to him, he shut down his account. Within an hour, he was kicked off the team.

Soon after that, Patterson went on WAFF-TV in Huntsville, Ala., to make a tearful apology, to deny that he was racist, and to acknowledge that his actions reflected on the 26 victims of the Newtown shooting, among many others.

“I put that on Twitter. I can’t take it back, and it’s always going to be in the back of somebody’s mind that I said that, but I can’t make them forgive me,” he said.

Probably should’ve thought of that before.

As in many situations that have sliced through society lately, big organizations like those running major sports at the highest levels have been diligent about trying to create guidelines and frameworks concerning social media, to protect their participants.

Which is why, in this case, a high-school kid who doesn’t like the black president cutting into his football might have no idea how to act on Twitter—but a college athlete should, because somebody probably has told him over and over again, and likely has written something down about it, and explained one way or another how it could come back to bite him and the school he represents.

Even in Division II football, and even for walk-ons.

And absolutely in Major League Baseball, on a team representing the largest market in the country.

The aforementioned Syndergaard is one of the pitching prospects the New York Mets got back in the R.A. Dickey trade. It took less than a day for the New York Daily News to uncover a gay slur he tweeted eight days earlier. Again, he later explained, he meant it for one friend. Oops.

You’d be shocked to learn that Syndergaard has deleted the tweet. Another basic rule: Doing that doesn’t work any better than deleting the entire account. It was still seen. No matter how much you wish you could have killed it, it lives forever.

Thus, he had to apologize for it on a conference call the Mets set up to introduce the new players acquired in their biggest transaction of the off-season, in which they had sent away their most popular player.

“I hope I didn’t offend anybody. I’m really sorry my first introduction to being a New York Met had to be like this,” he was quoted as saying—after referring to it as “a little mishap.”

Major League Baseball has the power to act on this. So do the Mets. Baseball this season suspended Yunel Escobar, then of Toronto, for three games after he wore a gay slur written on his eye black in a game.

So there are consequences to such rash decisions, no matter what people still seem to believe about the First Amendment (mainly, that it only applies to them personally, not to people they insult and damage).

Yet the list only grows of athletes who take to social media to spew the same ignorance the regular fan does way too often.

There was also the flood of racist slurs directed at Washington’s Joel Ward after his overtime goal eliminated the Boston Bruins from the NHL playoffs last spring. It took little time to discover where many of the tweets came from—and players on the Gloucester, Mass., High football team were severely punished by the school district when they were identified.

You’d think that nobody knows how social media works, even now. “Ignorance,” in that context, doesn’t explain it, though.

There may not be a group on the planet that knows better than athletes. It's time to wonder if they just don’t care.

It’s also time to wonder what will it take to make them stop the madness.